Academic contacts of the authors:
Topalovic Ana | Mendel University - Brno (CZ) : xtopalov@mendelu.cz
Villa Marco | University of Bergamo - Bergamo (IT) : m.villa43@studenti.unibg.it
Due to the trend of world and European integration processes and many agreements concluded in the last few decades (for example, the European Single Market, founded in 1993, which also includes the free movement of persons within the EU member state), the migration trend in EU countries has been growing rapidly since the early 1990s. Varying from country to country, in some Member States the number of migrants has increased several times in the mentioned period. But which European Union countries are most susceptible to this trend? What is it that attracts migrants to certain countries and what is it that rejects them from others? And finally, what is the structure of the population that leaves and immigrates to certain countries and what are differences between them?
We decided to start our analysis with these questions in mind, firstly looking for a possible relationship between the characteristics of countries and the 2019 data on immigration and emigration.
The code will not be printed in this html file. To see it, please contact the authors for a full access to the RMarkDown file. For our analysis, we integrated togheter several open-access datasets provided by Eurostat: migr_imm5prv, migr_emi3nxt, tec00114, nama_10_gdp and migr_pop1ctz. See the RMarkDown file for further details.
Plot 1: Relationship between the total number of emigrants and immigrants and the population size
(stock value from 2019 - Integrated datasets of multiple eurostat sources)
Plot 2: Structure of immigrants to UK and Spain according to age groups for both genders
(stock value from 2019 - Integrated datasets of multiple eurostat sources)
Plot 3: Structure of emigrants from UK and Spain according to age groups for both genders
(stock value from 2019 - Integrated datasets of multiple eurostat sources)
We saw that migration in the EU are not so correlated to the economic development of the country as on its population size. We could also note that countries characterized by the high number of immigrants are also characterized by the high number of emigrants, which might seem surprising, given that it can be expected that what attracts migrants to a particular country also affects the inhabitants of that country not to be motivated to emigrate. The question arises, what are the main reasons for migrants to choose a particular country to immigrate to.
Further topic for research that occurred is what is it that attracts and rejects different age groups to and from certain countries. We guessed if those differences goes beyond generically speaking better opportunities. In this sense, we thought also to cultural and religious similarities between countries, common languages, and government relationships in general. Questions that are still open in our mind and in the future could be investigated through dynamic flows related to migrations.